A Jew­ish Professor’s Polit­i­cal Pun­dit­ry: Fifty-plus Years of Pub­lished Com­men­tary by Ron Rubin

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A Jew­ish Professor’s Polit­i­cal Pun­dit­ry: Fifty-plus Years of Pub­lished Com­men­tary by Ron Rubin

Peri Devaney, ed.

From the Publisher

July 18, 2013

Accord­ing to the medieval Jew­ish philoso­pher Mai­monides, one of the ways to find divine for­give­ness is by ​“dis­man­tling for the pur­pose of build­ing.” Spir­i­tu­al­ly, the care­ful analy­sis of one s speech, actions, and thoughts can lead to self-improve­ment. For more than fifty years, polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor Ron Rubin adapt­ed this con­cept to the polit­i­cal are­na. Through his writ­ing, he endeav­ored to ​“dis­man­tle” polit­i­cal forces and events with the hope of ​“build­ing” a more secure future. The cen­tral­i­ty of polit­i­cal pow­er as a tool for a thriv­ing Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion has been Rubin’s con­stant theme.

A Jew­ish Professor’s Polit­i­cal Pun­dit­ry is an anthol­o­gy of Rubin’s works focus­ing on Israel, Judaism, and Amer­i­can and world pol­i­tics and per­son­al­i­ties that have had an impact on world Jew­ry. It includes arti­cles, opin­ion pieces, let­ters, seri­als, papers, and columns gath­ered from more than thir­ty pub­li­ca­tions world­wide includ­ing New York Mag­a­zine, The New York Times, the Jew­ish Press, the Jerusalem Post, West­ern Polit­i­cal Quar­ter­ly, Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor, For­ward, and the Wall Street Jour­nal. Eru­dite and impas­sioned, Rubin offers an acute ana­lyt­i­cal per­spec­tive on Amer­i­can Jew­ish polit­i­cal behav­ior, US for­eign pol­i­cy, the plight of Sovi­et Jew­ry, the Mid­dle East, ter­ror­ism, Israeli com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Jew­ish per­son­al­i­ties, and more.

One of the few Amer­i­cans of his gen­er­a­tion who has writ­ten on such a daz­zling vari­ety of sub­jects, Rubin is also among the most pro­lif­ic writ­ers on the sub­ject of Sovi­et Jew­ry. This anthol­o­gy gives read­ers a crit­i­cal por­trait of Jew­ish inter­ac­tion with the world dur­ing a tur­bu­lent era as seen through the eyes of an obser­vant mod­ern Ortho­dox Jew.